Missing the forest
We must pay attention to our planet, rather than ourselves
This past summer, one of our research interns with The Public Interest Network, Lindsay Hogan, was working on a project about the depletion of global resources over the last 100 years.
As often happens with such a big research project, she was running into some obstacles — the main one being that there simply isn’t a lot of data on key resource reserves (think gas, oil, or minerals) beyond a few decades ago. Often, the only historical datasets that she could find focused on human consumption, rather than the actual reserves remaining in the world.
The way Lindsay summed up the problem really stuck with me. “We’ve been measuring our own activities as a species far longer than we’ve been measuring the world around us,” she said. “If we really want to make a change to our society, we have to fight against this tendency.”
This insight struck me as an encapsulation of a scarcity mindset we need to leave behind. And my mind immediately went to the dominant statistic we use today to measure human society: Gross Domestic Product, or GDP.
Economics textbooks will tell you that GDP sums up the value of all goods and services produced in a nation’s economy: consumption, plus investments, plus government spending, plus net exports. The approach originated in the 1930s as a convenient way of measuring human economic activities in the midst of the Great Depression.
Of course, GDP has never fully captured all aspects of our economy. For one, it has never accounted for unpaid domestic work, which has, since the emergence of capitalism, enabled everything else in our economy to function.
Moreover, GDP is outdated. It’s actually getting worse at fulfilling its purpose. As a tool of the manufacturing era, it is ill-equipped to cope with the subtleties of the service economy, let alone the growing importance of the Internet. For instance, the huge positive impacts platforms like Wikipedia have on society’s well being are, for the most part, ignored.
To state the obvious, it’s difficult to imagine any modern economy that does not rely upon the domestic and the digital spheres, and yet, they are discounted by our predominant economic measure.
However, GDP’s biggest failing in the 21st century is exactly what Lindsay pointed to: it measures human activity only, and fails to take stock of the world we depend on for survival.
Indeed, GDP often actively rewards destruction of our natural environment. Extraction of fossil fuels contributes to GDP through the sale of the fuels themselves, and through the sale of other products that rely on them, such as gasoline cars. Planned obsolescence and wasteful repetitive consumption, from the technology industry to the fashion industry, also boost GDP.
Even disasters, like the 2010 BP oil spill, can be recorded as net positives for our nation’s Gross Domestic Product. It’s hard to express how little sense that makes. It is, in a word, absurd.
The tragedy of all this is simple, and yet crucial to point out. Our relentless focus on GDP growth, above — and at the expense of — all else, is unsustainable. It is undermining our long-term prospects for enjoying the very abundance that GDP purports to measure.
To build a more sustainable world, we cannot continue to obsess over measures of our own activity to the exclusion of measures of our natural world. Even if we continue to use GDP as one measure among many, it cannot take precedence over the condition of our water, our land, and our atmosphere.
Most urgently, any attempt to understand our society’s well-being must incorporate the unprecedented threat of climate change. We need to refocus as much of our attention as possible onto our levels of greenhouse gas emissions, their atmospheric concentrations, and the predicted impacts of those concentrations. Targeting these measures must be our priority.
After all, we humans — and our GDP — only exist because of this planet we call home. We must pay as much attention to the Earth as we do to ourselves.
